Phytosphere

turned them off. So she kept them on…until they failed all on their own.

She swung off the track and crashed into the dead bushes, hoping to hide the car with this last desperate maneuver before her final charge ran out. Junker that it was, the car behaved abysmally, and she found herself in a small creek once the twenty-second ordeal was at an end.

“Get out of the car!” she cried.

“Where are we going?” asked Hanna.

“As far away from here as we can.”

“She’s spent?” said Jake.

“She’s spent.”

He peered over at the dashboard as if he didn’t believe her, but finally nodded in a way that was far too grown-up.

They got out of the car and she was immediately surprised by how slippery the ground was, how it seemed to seethe underfoot with a rottenness all its own, and how it sent up a smell, not quite like a dead rat festering behind a baseboard but still carrying the sweetness of putrefaction.

They struggled down the creek bank. At last they reached the edge and waded into the water—the creek seemed to be the clearest path anywhere. The sound of Buzz’s pickup got closer and closer.

She started to cry. Who was meant to take this? One of Satan’s agents was following her through Armageddon. That was more than any housewife and part-time nursing-home attendant should be expected to take. She didn’t even have her car anymore.

“Keep going straight up,” she said.

“Mom, the bottom’s slippery,” said Hanna.

“Just stay along the side.”

She glanced back toward the road and saw Buzz’s truck coming along the crumbling blacktop, bumping and rattling as it took the potholes, pink haloes forming around his headlights in the mist rising from the ground. As he reached the track, he slowed down.

She turned around. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Mom, let’s climb up here,” said Jake.

She peered into the blackness and perceived some dead brambles in the stray glow coming from Buzz’s headlights.

“Okay.”

“Mom, I’m going to shoot him.”

“You can’t shoot long-range with a handgun.”

“If he gets anywhere close, I’m going to shoot him.”

“And what will you to do if you miss? He’s got a rifle. A rifle’s more accurate than a handgun. Hanna, are you all right?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Come up here. There’s some logs we can hide behind.”

They all climbed up onto the bank. She reached the logs. They looked like lengths of cow fence that had never been used and, to her surprise, they were dry. After all the rain, things were drying out again in the intense heat.

“Let’s get behind here.”

She got behind the logs. Jake settled in beside her. Glenda took Hanna’s arm and guided her. Hanna started coughing again.

“Hanna, just try to keep them down for the next little while.”

“Mom, I can’t…” She couldn’t finish her sentence because she started coughing again.

Jake gave his mother a glance.

Glenda shrugged. “Sweetie, just try.”

Jake took off his T-shirt, scrunched it up, and handed it to his sister. “Cough into this, Hanna. See if you can muffle them a bit.”

Hanna nodded woefully, took her brother’s T-shirt, and pressed it to her face. She struggled valiantly, managing to keep the explosions to a minimum, stopping the ragged, barking coughs that had plagued her ever since her medicine had run out, but Glenda wondered if it would be enough, especially in the dead quiet of the countryside. At least they were by a creek, and the current made a bit of noise—maybe enough to cover the sound of Hanna coughing.

Buzz turned off the road and came along the track, driving slowly, no more than two or three miles per hour. As he approached, he shone a flashlight out the driver’s-side window. Its beam was powerful, fully charged, and cut through the misty air with silvery precision, catching like bright flecks the flies that spun and whirled above the dead grass. Glenda wondered how Buzz was keeping his engine charged, but then remembered that his vehicle had a gasoline backup system. At last, his flashlight beam found her tire tracks, then the back of her car. It was funny yet awful to see the family car half in the creek like that.

Buzz turned off the track and drove toward her car through the field. Hanna coughed and coughed into Jake’s T-shirt, muting the noise. Glenda rubbed her back, trying to comfort her.

Jake peered over the logs, then started reloading the handgun.

Glenda tried to get her crying under control, but she was scared and her heart was filled with a great sorrow, not only for herself and her children, but for the man who was trying to hunt them down. How Buzz must have loved his brother. She regretted killing Maynard. Never wanted to. But what choice had he given her?

Buzz drove about halfway to the car and stopped. He got out of his truck and crouched behind the front fender for a long time, his rifle poised over the vehicle. Jake finished reloading the gun.

At last Buzz called out. “Glenda?” He obviously thought they were still in the car.

Jake’s hand tightened around the gun. Glenda reached over and rested her hand on his arm. Hanna continued her muffled coughing.

“Kids?” said Buzz.

Buzz waited another minute before he finally ran crouched over to the creek and took a position on his stomach ten yards upstream from her car. He crawled into a small hollow and disappeared from view for the next minute.

Hanna continued to cough, muffling it well. Still, could Buzz hear that? And just where the hell was he?

She couldn’t see him anywhere.

But then he sprang up on one knee, reminding her of a gopher coming out of its hole, and shot at her car, expertly pulling the bolt back after each round, expelling the spent cartridge, loading another one into the chamber, and squeezing the trigger so that he got off a shot every second or so—seven in all, emptying his magazine into the vehicle. He shot with vengeful intensity, his heated emotion guiding his actions. Each muzzle flash was a tongue of white flame. The reports echoed in the hills, and the sound of bullets clanking into her poor old car dried up Glenda’s tears immediately.

Her fear was now as cold and numbing as an anesthetic. Six simple words drifted through her mind: This guy wants to kill us. They were obvious words, and framed a fact she already knew, but until now they had been something only her mind had acknowledged, not her body. Now they filled her every blood vessel, every sinew, every bone with fear. Her physiological terror made her break into a sweat. She wanted to run, but checked the urge because to run now would only alert Buzz to their location. She swallowed and swallowed, but there seemed to be a hard clot of dryness in her throat that stopped her from swallowing with any degree of success. Hanna ceased coughing, as if the coughs had been scared right out of her. Jake was still on his knees with the gun poised over the pile of old logs.

Buzz meanwhile went back to the ground, and in the peripheral glow of his truck’s headlights, Glenda saw him reloading, thumbing one cartridge after another into his magazine.

At last he got back up.

“Glenda?” he called.

He stared at the car a moment more, then scanned the surrounding countryside. Now even Buzz looked scared.

“Glenda, why don’t you just give up? You know I’m going to get you sooner or later. I know you’re on your way to Marblehill. If you come out now, I’ll spare your children.”